Today is
Bloomsday, celebrating the publication of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. As it happens, however,
tomorrow will mark the third occasion of the similar celebration of Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. So the close
relation between these two writers grows.
The two
books just named have long been linked together, and for a variety of reasons.
Woolf’s
novel is a double
parody: its hypotexts are Homer’s Odyssey as well as Joyce’s Ulysses.*
In the 1919 essay “Modern Novels” (later published as “Modern Fiction”) Woolf praises
Joyce’s writing, although with reservations. Offered the chance to publish Ulysses, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s
Hogarth Press declined (on the grounds that to do so was beyond the technical
means of their small company, although the true reason involved the high risk
of being sued for publishing indecent material.
Much ink
has flowed on these topics and to some extent there is a kind of polarization
between those who believe that Woolf admired Joyce’s writing and those who
believe the opposite. There is obviously a deeper vein here, however, that of
censorship, despised by both of these Modernist writers. In any case it seems
to me important that there is now a Dalloway Day as well as a Bloomsday. By way
of celebration of both, I would like to quote something from A History of Reading, whose author,
Alberto Manguel, tells us of an observation by Spinoza:
It often
happens [Spinoza wrote] that in different books we read histories in themselves
similar but which we judge very differently, according to the opinions we have
formed of the authors. I remember once to have read in some book that a man
named Orlando Furioso used to ride a kind of winged monster through the air,
fly over any country he liked, kill unaided vast numbers of men and giants, and
other such fancies which from the point of view of reason are obviously absurd.
I read a very similar story, in Ovid, of Perseus, and also, in the books of
Judges and Kings, of Samson, who alone and unarmed killed thousands of men, and
of Elijah, who flew through the air and at last went up to heaven in a chariot
of fire, with fiery horses. All these stories are alike, but we judge them very
differently. The first one sought to amuse, the second had a political object,
the third a religious one.**
Not that I
think people will read less as internet and other technological novelties
continue to grow. Only that it does seem good to point out that different types
of text serve different purposes.
*My source
on this is Molly Hoff’s “The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs Dalloway,” Twentieth Century Literature 45:2
(Summer 1999), pp. 186-209.
**Manguel, A History of Reading, Chapter One.
